March 24, 1996

The Jew Who Fought to Stay German

By AMOS ELON

N A BLEAK DAY IN MAY 1942, a 61-year-old disenfranchised German Jew named Victor Klemperer, trapped in Nazi Germany, noted in his diary: "I continue to write. This is my heroics. I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end." He was a former professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden and had escaped deportation to the death camps in the east only because he was married to an "Aryan" woman. Gestapo agents, on a routine checkup, had just ransacked his room in one of the cramped "Jews' houses" on the outskirts of Dresden to which he and his wife had been confined after the confiscation of his house.

Fortunately for him, the searchers had overlooked the last pages of the diary he had been keeping since 1933; its discovery would have meant certain death. Instead, he was only beaten. His wife, Eva, a former concert pianist, was kicked and spat upon and screamed at: "Du Judenhurel!" ("You Jew's whore!"). When the Gestapo left, Klemperer was able to return to his diary. He felt that he must record everything quickly after the event, every small detail, every passing mood, every incident in what he called "the sheer fairy-tale horror" of life under the Nazi tyranny: "Observe, study, record everything that happens -- tomorrow it'll look different, tomorrow it will feel differently. Seize it as it happens and feels."

Klemperer's "Diaries 1933-1945" were published last fall in Germany to general acclaim and to some argument. The acclaim was a result of Victor Klemperer's evocative literary gift, his power of observation. No one, including those who toward the end of the war tried to assassinate Hitler, had been so clearsighted from the very first as he had been about the unmitigated horror of Nazism and the ruin it would bring upon Germany.

But in a country still torn between guilt and shame and a desire to finally "draw a line" separating the past, there was also controversy about Klemperer that highlighted some of the problems Germans, inevitably, still have with themselves. The fact that Klemperer -- in his extreme state of segregation and isolation -- knew as early as March 1942 of the existence of the death camps at Auschwitz and wrote about it in his diary was heralded by one reviewer as yet another proof that knowledge of the mass murders "was much more widespread than had been assumed so far." Marcel Reich-Ranicki, perhaps the leading German literary critic, announced on television that no one would ever again be entitled to claim he or she "did not know." If Klemperer, in his isolation, knew, most Germans must have known, too.

This, and the surprising fact that Klemperer remained a "German patriot" almost to the bitter end -- he regarded the Nazis as "un-German" -- added heat and interest to the publication of his diaries. Some of the reviews echoed the ongoing discussion in Germany over what it means nowadays "to be a German": the quarrel between those who deplore the sharp decline of patriotism after the war and those who wish only to be German-speaking Europeans, between those who would like Germany to act once more like a big power and those who, for reasons of personal comfort or ease, would prefer her to be little more than a large Switzerland.

The Klemperer diaries were long considered lost or suppressed by the Communist authorities of East Germany. Klemperer had chosen to live there after the war because he believed that the East German Communists were more thorough in their persecution of Nazi criminals than the West Germans. After Klemperer's death in 1960, his widow deposited the work in the Dresden Landesarchiv. A former student of Klemperer's named Walter Nowojski recognized its literary and political merit. In the 1980's he began to decipher and transcribe the difficult manuscript (more than 5,000 pages tightly filled with minute script).

For Nowojski this was a labor of love. "I had little hope at the time that the diaries would ever be published," he said recently. The East German authorities (among the most hard-line Communists in the Soviet bloc) would not have liked Klemperer's acid remarks on the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. They would have resented his equation of Bolshevist and Nazi propaganda. Klemperer's picture of Nazism differed radically from theirs. The official Communist view was that Nazism had been an alliance of "grand capitalists" and "grand militarists" working together to suppress the "working class." From Klemperer's diaries, Nazism emerges as a movement of dour, petit-bourgeois Archie Bunkers led by state-paid gangsters and terrorists.

When the diaries finally came out last autumn, five years after the fall of the Berlin wall, they were, not surprisingly, compared with the diaries of Anne Frank. Yet Klemperer's spare and precise text contains no trace of sentimentality. And there is nothing naive in it except, perhaps, the author's burning faith in Germany and German Kultur. This faith of his survived some very bad moments during the Third Reich. Only toward the very end was it beginning to shake like teeth in an old man's mouth.

Klemperer was the son of a small-town Reform rabbi. In the assimilationist parlance of the time, his father was known as a Landprediger (country preacher). Klemperer had four brothers -- one a prominent lawyer, another a famous surgeon called as a consultant to Lenin's deathbed. All five converted as young men to the Lutheran faith, not necessarily because they were true believers but because it was the leading national religion. The conductor Otto Klemperer was their cousin.

Even after Hitler's victory in the elections of 1933, Klemperer continued to consider himself a German patriot, referring often to his Deutschtum, or German-ness. ("I am forever German, a German 'nationalist,' " he wrote in July 1935. "The Nazis are un-German.") A year after being compelled, to his utter horror, to display the yellow Judenstern on his outer coat, he wrote: "I am now fighting the hardest battle for my Deutschtum. I must hold on to it: I am German. The others are not. I must hold on to it. The spirit decides, not the blood. I must hold on to it: Zionism on my part would have been a comedy which baptism was not."

Like many completely assimilated Jews in Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany, he believed that Germans were, as he put it, a "chosen people," culturally and politically superior to others. "I still feel more shame than fear," he wrote in 1934. "Shame for Germany."

Convincing themselves somehow that Nazism would not last, Victor and Eva Klemperer did not emigrate, as his brothers and cousin did. He and his wife even decided in 1935 to build themselves a little house in the village of Dolzschen in the hills above Dresden. At this time they already had to comply with a new Nazi ordinance that all country houses must have a tilted "Germanic" gable (flat roofs were verboten as alien, or "decadent" Bauhaus). The house, though small, had one room large enough to accommodate Eva's grand piano. Klemperer must have been one of the very few people of Jewish origin in Nazi Germany who invested most of their savings in German real estate at a time when others were running for their lives. He deluded himself that converts and war veterans like himself would be spared. Much later he would write: "I escaped, I dug myself into my profession. I held my lectures and obsessively overlooked the fact that the benches before me grew emptier and emptier."

Summarily dismissed from his post as a professor at the university, he filled his free time with getting a driver's license and buying a car, in which he and his wife toured the lovely countryside of Thuringen and Sachsen. In 1937, still proud of the Distinguished Service Medal he had won in World War I, he confessed: "I myself have had too much nationalism in me and I am now being punished for it." In 1938 he felt chastised by the recent Nuremberg racial laws and yet, after driving with his wife through the lovely hill country southeast of Dresden, he noted, "How beautiful this Germany might have been if one could still feel German and be proud of being one." In 1942, already a slave worker relegated to a kind of ghetto on the outskirts of Dresden, he assured one of his fellow inmates that "fanaticism" was "un-German" by definition.

Fleeing Dresden in February 1945, after the great Allied bombardment that leveled the city in a single night, he finally lost faith not only in Germany but in the entire human race. Yet not for long. Eva Klemperer tore the yellow Judenstern off her husband's coat. Under assumed names they survived in the countryside until the liberation.

The two fat diary volumes -- 1,620 pages, costing 98 Deutschmarks (about $65) -- have been a best seller in Germany for months (100,000 copies in six printings so far, according to Aufbau, the publisher). Klemperer had a novelist's eye for detail. His trained philologist's ear was tuned to every changing inflection in the corrupted language of totalitarianism. There are frequent entries in the diary headlined "L.T.I." (Lingua Tertii Imperii, Klemperer's term for the language of the Third Reich) and filled with examples of Nazi words and their analysis. For its cool, lucid style and power of observation, Klemperer's diary has been hailed as a document of rare authenticity -- the best-written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich, not solely from the vantage point of a victim.

Klemperer's ambition was to be the "cultural historian of the present catastrophe" (Jan. 10, 1942). In this he was entirely successful. His main theme is the uniqueness of the Nazi tyranny: "There is nothing spontaneous. All is methodical and orderly, organized 'cultivated' cruelty, and it happens hypocritically, mendaciously in the name of Kultur."

Day in, day out, Klemperer comments on current affairs: on Hitler's speeches ("his favorite foreign words are 'discrimination' and 'defamation' ") and the elimination of all opposition, on the racial laws, on the war's progress. There are vivid accounts of events he witnesses, conversations he overhears and many character studies of victims and victimizers, fanatics and opportunists of all sorts.

All this, and the ever-narrowing horizons of his own private world, produces a nightmarish picture of life within a national society gone berserk; the inferno is an artful mosaic, made up of endless fragments of meanness (and a few isolated acts of kindness). Hitler's rise to power is described as the result of a chaotic mixture of nihilism and masochism, a rebellion against authority and at the same time a neurotic submission to it. "It is amazing," Klemperer notes soon after Hitler's election as Reichskanzler, "how everything collapses . . . terror is accepted. It's shocking how all opposition has disappeared. No one dares any more to speak up."

Klemperer's own private attempt to hold the beast at bay by recording its acts and by exposing its corrupted language continued to the end, an undertaking as crazy, as courageous and as endearing as that of the little barber in Chaplin's "Great Dictator."

Life in a concentration camp would have been worse, of course. Since he was not deported to Auschwitz or even confined in Dachau, Klemperer was, in a sense, a privileged Jew. Nevertheless, the daily account of how his own living space narrows and diminishes step by step is harrowing enough. First, his students stop registering for his courses; then he loses his professorship. His colleagues begin not to recognize him in the street. ("They evade me like the plague." July 15, 1936). Then, his telephone is disconnected; his driver's license is revoked; his food rations are cut to a minimum of cabbage and potatoes. His typewriter is taken away. Banned from the university library, he is forced to give up his scientific work. He is ordered to adopt a new first name: he must call himself Israel Victor Klemperer or face deportation to a concentration camp.

He and his wife have to vacate their little house in Dolzschen (but continue to pay taxes on it and all repairs). For the remaining years of the war they are moved from one Judenhaus to another, where several "mixed" families crowd into a single apartment. They must kill their cat, for Jews are not allowed to keep pets. Klemperer cannot buy flowers, books, tobacco, newspapers or shaving cream ("Jews are supposed to grow beards"). He is pressed into forced labor; he shovels snow and works in a Dresden factory. He must walk to work (nearly four miles each way) since the use of all public transportation is forbidden to Jews.

In September 1941, made for the first time to display the yellow Judenstern on his outer coat, he registers "a raving attack of despair." He suffers from pains in his chest from angina pectoris. Of an otherwise robust constitution, he sleeps well at night. His nightmares start when he wakes up. He expects to be deported at any moment. He occasionally scavenges the garbage for food. A few elderly people, seeing the Judenstern on his coat, come up in the dark and silently shake his hand in sympathy. Others, mostly young, spit at him or scream foul epithets.

When a neighbor remarks that Klemperer, in his isolation, would hardly be able to cover in his diary the "main events" like the war, he writes: "The main events aren't as important for my record as is the every-day of the tyranny, which might be forgotten. A thousand gnat bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I note the gnat bites."

Maintaining the diary and getting it out of the house periodically to a safe hiding place took on life-and-death importance. The diary was his "balancing rod without which I would crash into the abyss." After 1941, he was pressed into work as a slave laborer. "In times of utter disgust and despair, in the endless dreariness of mechanical factory work, at the bedside of the sick and the dying, at the tombs, in moments of extreme oppression, humiliation and disgrace, the demand I directed at myself was to observe and record. It always helped."

His wife's help was, of course, crucial too. She took the risk of carrying his notes to the house of an old friend, where they were hidden in a suitcase. Eva Klemperer suffered from frequent nervous breakdowns, attacks of neuralgic pain and bouts of deep depression. She was a truly heroic woman who shared her husband's humiliations and saved him from the worst -- the death camps. The diary is a moving testimony to their love, the story of a close partnership that no hardship and terror could break. I SPENT SOME TIME IN GERMANY LAST MONTH talking about the diaries to university people, writers and literary critics. All agreed that one reason for their appeal was, of course, their literary quality. The other reason was said to be political.

Henryk M. Broder, a columnist for Der Spiegel magazine, says Klemperer's diaries are like litmus paper: they can be employed to test the reactions of people to some key notions that have recently come under much discussion in Germany: identity, nationalism, "German-ness," Heimat (homeland), "pride of Fatherland" and patriotism. Decried in the past, mainly by liberals, these are being increasingly hailed as "positive" values in the aftermath of German reunification.

Before reunification, liberal Germans often maintained that Germany was no longer a nation-state. Even some conservatives were ready to concede that nationalism had been the gravedigger of Europe, and of Germany, in two World Wars. Liberals upheld Verfassungspatriotism (patriotism linked not to the German nation but to the liberal West German constitution adopted in 1949 with the blessings of the Anglo-American-French occupation powers).

After reunification, more and more people said that Germany must adopt a new "national agenda." Rich, powerful and located in the heart of Europe, the country could no longer hide behind the skirts of the United States. Germany was said to have become a nation-state again, entitled to throw its weight about. Fifty years after the war, Germany had the right, once again, to be proud of itself -- not of Nazism, of course, but of its more distant past and of its present, its thriving economy, its free democratic institutions, its culture.

For those who deplored the lack of national pride among Germans in the postwar period, the moving diaries of a terrorized, disenfranchised Jew who continued to be proud of his Deutschtum struck a welcome chord. The film maker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg welcomed it as a document vindicating his yearnings for the irrational "creative power" of Heimat and Volk. Martin Walser, one of Germany's best-known novelists (formerly a Communist sympathizer, now a neoconservative), found in Klemperer's life and Weltanschauung convenient means to propagate his own German Dream. Klemperer had already appeared in one of his novels in 1991. Last year, Walser raised a fury of protests when he publicly argued that one reason for the spread of skinhead violence and right-wing xenophobia in Germany was a general neglect of Heimat and patriotism.

After reading the diaries, Walser hailed Klemperer as the "ideal human figure in the German memory-conflict." Klemperer had proudly "upheld his Deutschtum and Deutschsein during the 12 years of legalized Gestapo terror."

Klemperer was recently awarded posthumously the prestigious Geschwister Scholl Prize for Civic Courage. (Sophie and Hans Scholl, two young students, were executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.) Walser happened to be the main speaker at the award ceremony. This could not have been accidental. He devoted nearly his entire speech to the proposition that the memory of Auschwitz must not be allowed to destroy the possibility of renewed Jewish assimilation within German nationhood and culture. Klemperer was his star witness. Even Klemperer's conversion to Protestantism "independent of all religious feeling had been an act of emancipation," Walser insisted. He is encouraged by the upward trend in Jewish immigration to Germany (the number of Jews in Germany has more than doubled in recent years) and by the moving example of Klemperer's attachment to Germany. Walser went on to suggest that the project of Jewish assimilation ought to be taken up once again. The so-called German-Jewish symbiosis had not necessarily been a tragicomic self-delusion, as Gershom Scholem and many others had claimed. Nor was it necessarily one-sided. The tragedy had not been inevitable.

Walser's speech caused a stir. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas, visibly angry, walked out of the assembly hall. A few days later Habermas protested in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper against Walser's attempt to whitewash the tragic dimension of the Jewish experience in Germany with a "mouthful of self-congratulations" and the evocation of an "obscenely harmonized German-Jewish culture."

I spent a day in Dresden recently, walking up the road to the village of Dolzschen, where Klemperer and his wife had built their little house in 1934 and to which they returned to live after the liberation. The house still has its "gable" in the regulation Germanic style. But the village, which was long ago incorporated into the nearby city, has lost the rural character that the Klemperers so loved. Their rose garden and fruit trees have disappeared.

Dresden was known before the war as the "Florence of the North." Very little of its baroque splendor remains. The view of Dresden today from the surrounding hills is almost as bleak as that of, say, Kaliningrad or of some other Communist city quickly rebuilt after the war -- drab, monotonous and shabby. Some of the main thoroughfares that were cut through the old city after the war are wide enough to allow eight tanks abreast to pass a reviewing stand. There are plans to narrow them.

Downtown, in the old city center, dark smog hung between the dilapidated houses, turning the sunlight a sickly brown-yellow. Dresden is still only the torso of a city. Some of the better-known historical buildings that Klemperer loved were carefully restored, based on photographs and on Canaletto paintings. They are surrounded today by a ramshackle Marxist version of Dallas. Gaping voids remain.

More than 50 years after the terrible air bombardment that killed 135,000 people -- and saved Klemperer's life -- many scars and wounds endure. As I turned the corner into the wide Pragerstrasse, I ran into 100 or so men and women, mostly young, chanting slogans. They were protesting the recent daubing, presumably by skinheads or neo-Nazis, of tombstones in an old Jewish cemetery. On their heavy overcoats and parkas many displayed yellow cardboard Judensterns, a gesture that attracted the attention of onlookers. The yellow stars gave the place a haunted, ghostly quality.

Amos Elon, author of "Journey Through a Haunted Land," abook about Germany, writes
frequently on the Middle East and Europe.

Excerpts From the Diary of Victor Klemperer

March 10, 1933 . . . Hitler elected as Chancellor. What I had called terror was only a mild prelude. . . . It is amazing how everything collapses . . . prohibitions and acts of violence. And with it, on streets and radio, unrestrained propaganda. On Saturday I heard a piece of Hitler's speech in Konsigsberg. I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous roaring bark, the bark, really, of a clergyman. . . . How long will I be able to retain my professorship?

March 17, 1933 . . . on Friday, unfortunately, Thiemes was here. It was frightful . . . such enthusiastic conviction and support. The phraseology of unity. Progress piously repeated. Grete (his wife) said, "Everything else failed, now we have to blow this horn." He corrected her vehemently. "We didn't have to." In really free elections he has voted for the right cause. This I can't forgive him. The poor dog may be frightened for his job. He must howl with the wolves. But why in front of me? . . . Naked violence, breach of law, terrible hypocrisy, unmitigated barbarism poses as law.

April 25, 1933 The focus of the Hitlerite movement is undoubtedly the Jewish cause. I fail to understand why on their agenda this item is so central. It means their ultimate ruin. But probably our ruin as well.

Feb. 11, 1936 Outside the post office a man stopped me. "Don't you recognize me? Dr. Kleinstock, rector of the Vitztum High School. I saw you the other day too. You also saw me but you looked away. I was afraid you looked away because you feared I wouldn't greet you. That's why I stopped you to ask, How are you?" I was moved by his attitude. I answered and added, "I was told that you, Herr Rector, are a top-Nazi now." He: "Oh my God, one can never please everybody."

July 19, 1937 I myself have had too much nationalism in me and now I am being punished.

Sept. 15, 1941 (after Jews were ordered to display the yellow Star of David) Frau Kreidl Sr. was in tears. Frau Voss suffered a heart attack. Friedheim said this was the most difficult blow to date, worse than the confiscation of capital. I feel shattered, and cannot calm myself. Eva wants to take care of all errands from now on. I will leave the house only at night for a few moments.

April 29, 1942 Another house search, another suicide. Dr. Korn -- a surgeon, Catholic Jew, wife Aryan -- was beaten up in the street. He was ordered to present himself next morning at the Gestapo. Suicide during the night. The head of the search party: "We'll see to it that nobody among you comes out of this alive."

May 27, 1942 This afternoon these pages go to Pirna. My latest fear is that there, too, they are not absolutely safe. . . . If discovered there, these manuscripts . . . would destory Eva and me. The danger is so great and constantly present that I have become fatalistic. This manuscript is my duty and my ultimate fulfillment.

May 30, 1942 We spoke this morning about the unbelievable human capacity to endure and get accustomed. The fairy-tale horror of our existence: fear of every knock at the door, abuse, disgrace, hunger, prohibitions, the gruesome enslavement, daily approaching dangers, every day new victims all around, absolute helplessness -- and yet still hours of ease, reading, work, eating more and more miserable food, one vegetates and again one hopes.

June 21, 1942 The empty garden bench outside of my window gives me pain. Ernst Kreidl and Dr. Friedheim sat there last summer. Now Kreidl has been shot dead and Friedheim has "died" in jail.

June 25, 1942 Mornings are the worst. Everything crowds in on you. Will I be beaten and spat at today? Summoned? Arrested? Arrest now means certain death.